You can make these SXSWi panels happen!

It’s SXSW PanelPicker season again. There are just hours left to vote for your favourite proposals for next year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin – and Alex has three dandy proposals for your consideration.

We hope you’ll consider clicking your support for one, two or (make Alex’s day!) all three:

What social media analytics can’t tell you

With Beth Kanter, Virginia Heffernan and Jeremiah Owyang

Social media analytics can help you understand the active members of your social media audience, but what about the people who aren’t posting? How do you fill in the gaps in your analytics with insights into your customers’ purchases, your fans’ offline interests, or your users’ reasons for liking what they like? 

This session presents a new form of social media analysis that combines social and survey data. We’ll share the results of three demonstration projects based on social media and survey data from 6,000 respondents. We’ll show how this sheds light on some of the more mysterious corners of the social web, helping us to understand variations in online engagement, media consumption and purchasing among different types of social media users. 

Whether you’re looking for fresh insights on what makes social media users tick, or trying to expand your own monitoring and analytics program, this session will give you a first look at the latest research and research methods.

Social to sale: How social media drives purchasing

Today’s social media users love to tweet about the latest gadget, Facebook the deals they’ve turned up, and use Pinterest to catalog the design objects they’re lusting after. But how does all that social media activity translate into actual purchasing?

This panel answers that question with data from Vision Critical’s three-year investigation of the impact of social media on consumer buying habits. As featured in the July 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review, this research provides unprecedented insight into key factors like the way consumers say social sharing influences their purchase decisions, the length of time between sharing and purchase, and where social networks diverge in how they drive spending.

These insights come from a series of seven surveys conducted over 18 months, including a study of 80,000 social media users (the world’s largest to date.) This research will be updated with a 2013 study whose results will be released at SXSW 2014.

Beyond unplugging: how to stay sane online

With Lauren Bacon, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D. and Rohan Gunatillake

If abstinence education can’t stop teens from getting pregnant, why are we preaching digital abstinence as the cure for information overload and online distraction? In this session we’ll dig into our digital and personal toolboxes to share the practices, habits, apps and gadgets that can foster a healthy relationship to technology.

Countless articles explain how to “unplug” and take internet sabbaticals – a kind of binge/purge approach to online living. This session’s speakers will kick off the conversation with their own thoughts and suggestions for how to find a middle way, and then open the floor for your ideas and tips: How do you maintain your health, sanity, and relationships while using tech tools?

If you worry that you shouldn’t be checking your iPhone in bed, but you’re not prepared to do something as radical as actually turning it off, this session is your chance to find and share strategies and ideas for staying sane and online.

You can make these SXSWi panels happen!

It’s SXSW PanelPicker season again. There are just hours left to vote for your favourite proposals for next year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin – and Alex has three dandy proposals for your consideration.

We hope you’ll consider clicking your support for one, two or (make Alex’s day!) all three:

What social media analytics can’t tell you

With Beth Kanter, Virginia Heffernan and Jeremiah Owyang

Social media analytics can help you understand the active members of your social media audience, but what about the people who aren’t posting? How do you fill in the gaps in your analytics with insights into your customers’ purchases, your fans’ offline interests, or your users’ reasons for liking what they like? 

This session presents a new form of social media analysis that combines social and survey data. We’ll share the results of three demonstration projects based on social media and survey data from 6,000 respondents. We’ll show how this sheds light on some of the more mysterious corners of the social web, helping us to understand variations in online engagement, media consumption and purchasing among different types of social media users. 

Whether you’re looking for fresh insights on what makes social media users tick, or trying to expand your own monitoring and analytics program, this session will give you a first look at the latest research and research methods.

Social to sale: How social media drives purchasing

Today’s social media users love to tweet about the latest gadget, Facebook the deals they’ve turned up, and use Pinterest to catalog the design objects they’re lusting after. But how does all that social media activity translate into actual purchasing?

This panel answers that question with data from Vision Critical’s three-year investigation of the impact of social media on consumer buying habits. As featured in the July 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review, this research provides unprecedented insight into key factors like the way consumers say social sharing influences their purchase decisions, the length of time between sharing and purchase, and where social networks diverge in how they drive spending.

These insights come from a series of seven surveys conducted over 18 months, including a study of 80,000 social media users (the world’s largest to date.) This research will be updated with a 2013 study whose results will be released at SXSW 2014.

Beyond unplugging: how to stay sane online

With Lauren Bacon, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D. and Rohan Gunatillake

If abstinence education can’t stop teens from getting pregnant, why are we preaching digital abstinence as the cure for information overload and online distraction? In this session we’ll dig into our digital and personal toolboxes to share the practices, habits, apps and gadgets that can foster a healthy relationship to technology.

Countless articles explain how to “unplug” and take internet sabbaticals – a kind of binge/purge approach to online living. This session’s speakers will kick off the conversation with their own thoughts and suggestions for how to find a middle way, and then open the floor for your ideas and tips: How do you maintain your health, sanity, and relationships while using tech tools?

If you worry that you shouldn’t be checking your iPhone in bed, but you’re not prepared to do something as radical as actually turning it off, this session is your chance to find and share strategies and ideas for staying sane and online.

Can individuals use marketing tools without sacrificing authenticity?

Alex’s Harvard post about metrics and the obsessive condition she calls analytophilia has triggered a lot of conversation this morning about the role analytics ought to play in organizational communications.

Which has me thinking about the role tools like analytics play in our personal communications online, too – for better and for worse.

The past few years have seen some fascinating changes as organizations – some tentative, some confident, a few very bold – adopt the tools of the social web. We’ve seen windows and occasionally great big doors opening in the walls that separate businesses, non-profits and governments from the public.

But something else is happening too. Just as the tools of social media are turning marketing into personal conversation, they’re also turning personal conversation into marketing.

To see it in action, look no further than metrics and analytics.

Think of the number of people you deal with via the social web who are obsessed with followers, friend counts and network sizes. Look at the explosion of sites designed to rank your reach and influence on Twitter.

Metrics now lurk at the margins of everything we do in social media, offering to tell us how popular it was, how many folks liked or disliked it, who linked to it, who followed us, who dropped us and how it affected our chances are of going to that great Web 2.0 prom called the A-list.

Get sucked into that, and everything you say and do online becomes strategic… or, more accurately, tactical: “Will this get me more followers?” “I’d like to blog about this, but that will get me more profile.” “How does this move the needle on however I’m measuring influence?”

Awful, right? It would be easy to conclude that metrics and other marketing tools have polluted social media and corrupted personal communication, stripping it of authenticity and spontaneity, and replacing it with calculated manipulation.

Cartoon

But here’s the thing.

We express ourselves for a reason. Yes, there’s a drive to speak out for its own sake – and sometimes we’re just howling at the moon – but usually we want to have some kind of impact.

And often that impact isn’t as shallow as you might believe from the mass media stereotypes of social media. Often the impact we’re looking for is to reach out to someone. Sometimes we’re seeking comfort or offering it. Sometimes we’re sharing a point of view, hoping for feedback, hoping to change some minds, prompt a discussion or shift behaviour.

The metrics available to us are very poor approximations in measuring the potential impact we can have… but they’re a starting point. The key, if we want to keep our conversations authentic and make that impact count, is to remember they’re only a starting point.

It comes down, as it so often does, to intention and attention: doing things with a view to what they do, how they change the world. But we don’t know if we’re succeeding, if we’re on the right track, unless we know what the difference is between what was before we acted, and what is now that we have. Sometimes we measure that difference qualitatively, sometimes intuitively… and sometimes quantitatively, with metrics.

We don’t have those metrics yet. We probably aren’t sure quite what it is we’re measuring. But acting with intention ultimately means answering those questions… and, yes, acting a little strategically.

That’s where organizational communications – disciplines like marketing and public relations – do have something to teach us about our personal conversations. The trick for us as individuals is to apply those lessons with care. We are not our personal brands, and we aren’t organizations, and we don’t have the same goals and needs.

Understanding the difference is the first step toward using the tools of marketing to dramatically transform our personal impact while staying true to ourselves and each other.

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